Vulnerability, Precarity and Vigilantism in Lee Child's
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“Get a Problem, Solve a Problem”: Vulnerability, Precarity and Vigilantism in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher Novels Mafaz Mahmoud English Studies - Literature Bachelor 15 ECTS Credits Spring Semester 2020 Supervisor: Asko Kauppinen Abstract This paper analyzes how vulnerability is represented in the Jack Reacher series, by drawing on work by Bryan Turner and Judith Butler. The purpose of the research is to investigate the reason Reacher’s acts of vigilantism are needed. I look at examples of vulnerability and precarity found in the books Killing Floor and Die Trying, and argue that state neglect is the cause of economic and social vulnerability in the towns Margrave and Yorke, leading to precarity expressed as criminal money and community subjugation controlling the towns. I conclude that the solution presented, through vigilantism, is reassuring but insufficient, but that the series, in representing a complex display of vulnerability and acknowledging the insufficiency of the solution, stresses the difficulty of presenting a simple solution to the multifaceted nature of the issue of vulnerability. Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 1 Vulnerability and Precarity ............................................................................................................. 6 Neglected Towns .............................................................................................................................. 11 Vigilantism ....................................................................................................................................... 19 A Hybrid Ending .............................................................................................................................. 23 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 26 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................... 28 Mahmoud 1 Introduction - Humor me, look out the window; tell me what you see. - I see the same things I see every day. - Well, imagine you’ve never seen it. - Jack Reacher The crime thriller Jack Reacher series, written by author Lee Child, is about an ex- military cop who wanders the US seeing the country he never saw when he was still in service and stumbling into problems he needs to solve along the way. When asked where Reacher came from, Child answered that he started writing and “Reacher came out; in a way he has always existed in the subconscious” (ITV News 5:15 – 5:20). What he means is that Reacher descends from a richness of mythological figures and has shown up throughout different times in history. In “Critical Investigations: Convention and Ideology in Detective Fiction,” William Stowe argues that “we must be willing to treat popular fiction not as mindless pastimes or anonymous cultural documents, but as self-conscious works of literary art” (571). While the first part of this proposition strikes me as true— genre fiction is not a mere mindless pastime— the second part assumes an initial non-credibility of the genre, an association with the dime novel that it needs defending from, and thus seeks to assign genre fiction a supposed high “literary art” status in order to show its potential. But genre’s strength lies rather in its disinterest in status. Its utmost goal of engaging the reader is an ample substitute to aspiring towards the values ascribed to literary art. As Nancy Holland points out in “Genre Fiction and ‘The Origin of The Work of Art’,” like photography and blues music, with genre fiction: Readers are meant to feel as if they are experiencing the story, not reading it. Thus, “artful” language that would call attention to itself would be a serious flaw in this kind of Mahmoud 2 writing. We are not meant to think, “Boy, that’s beautiful. I’d never thought about it that way before”; we are supposed to think “Okay, what’s going to happen next.” (218) The ease and clarity of the language of genre fiction work to engage the reader through not bringing attention to itself. It reflects the language the reader uses in their daily life, which gives a sense of familiarity that communicates a message that the world in the book is similar enough to the world of the reader. This familiarity is one part of the illusion genre fiction creates; the other is the formula followed in such books. The basic formula, the “beginning-middle-end structure[,] is one clear hallmark of genre fiction”, continues Holland (217). While most stories have these three qualities, with genre fiction, the reader may know how the story would unfold and what is to be expected, including, as Holland notes, the way it ends: [N]ot just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity’s ability to survive even the most alien (and most familiar) of threats. (217) The ideal ending provides a sense of comfort that may not exist in reality, and together with direct language, creates the illusion of a world familiar, yet better than the one being represented. Whereas this creation of illusion lies at the centre of much of the criticism directed towards genre fiction, Holland asserts, it is in this power of illusion that the subversive ability of genre fiction lies (218). Through presenting an engaging, familiar enough world for the reader to be immersed in with an ideal ending that promises a “slightly different, better world, [genre] may have the paradoxical effect of making us less content with the one in which we live”, prompting a change (Holland 220). The romance and the western are examples of genres Holland uses that demonstrate this point clearly. In the late 1970s, “[a]fter generations of portraying working Mahmoud 3 ‘girls’ who wanted nothing more than marriage in their lives, romance novels started championing the working woman’s right to have a lifelong career”, she writes (Holland 221). The romance evolves with the cultural change it documents and inspires, but for the western, according to Holland, it is the disappearance that counts. The reason why the western has all but disappeared is that the western is no longer relevant; the reassuring fantasy of the western, she writes, “is to help us believe that the solitary righteous individual can triumph over chaos and evil” (Holland 221). While this fantasy of individualization would have been the preferred reading of the last century, she continues, it is no longer relevant for the “Generation X dot.com workers who understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be genuinely empowered as individuals in our contemporary world” (Holland 221). Like its classic protagonist on a mission, the western finished the job and moved on. However, even if the western has all but disappeared, the solitary, righteous individual hero has not disappeared. Instead, it certainly lives on in suspense crime fiction such as the Jack Reacher series, albeit in an updated way, something that inspired research to uncover the appeal on this bestselling series. Since Reacher is central to the series, much of the research done has focused on Reacher himself. Jeroen Vermeulen, in “The Lonely Road to Freedom: Jack Reacher’s Interpretation of an American Myth”, argues that Reacher is characterized most by the “notion of sovereign personal freedom, a kind of absolute freedom that seems unattainable in ‘the land of the free’ in times when even the American Dream is government-issued”, which he calls a “utopian interpretation of freedom” that plays a pivotal part in the series’ success (122). Similarly, Lee Mitchell, in “Fairytales and Thrillers: The Contradictions of Formula Narratives” attributes the novels’ success to Reacher’s “one obsession: to stay anonymous by living off-the-grid” (121), which offers a sense of comfort in a world that’s increasingly tracking our every move. Mahmoud 4 Looking at the previous research, while it sheds light into Reacher’s appeal, it provides no account for what he does. What has not been researched are the reasons this individual loner hero intervenes in the problems of the places he visits, or why he is needed. This, I claim, is due to the state of vulnerability present in the communities he helps, which results from lack of governmentality, which in turn exposes them to criminality. The various natures of vulnerability researched highlights the wide definition of the word. In his “’How Safe Do You Feel?’: James Bond, Skyfall, and the Politics of the Secret Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat” essay, James Smith explores cyberterrorism and the ways it exposes governmental vulnerability, meaning threats putting the government into a tough position which requires Bond’s help, most apparent in the Bond’s villain, “a master computer hacker who steals MI6’s closest secrets and leaks them on the Internet” (147), giving Bond an enemy he cannot beat. Also, Liani Lochner, in “The Politics of Precarity: Contesting Neoliberalism's Subjects in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger” investigates the vulnerability of the individual and the community in the age of globalization, characterized most by inequality through which “certain groups in society are exposed to, and others are protected from, violence” (37). Focusing on two books from the Jack Reacher series, Killing Floor and Die Trying, I investigate